You can manually issue bioctl(8) but it is far easier to copy the new release RAMDISK kernel (bsd.rd) to your root directory, and boot it from there. The bootloader will prompt for passphrase or look for the keydisk.

Code:

# cp bsd.rd /new.bsd.rd
# reboot
.
.
.
passphrase:
boot> new.bsd.rd

Last edited by jggimi; 9th October 2017 at 09:03 PM.
Reason: forgot to add the passphrase prompt.

The upgrade script will ask you which disk to upgrade. You'll select the appropriate drive, such as sd0, sd1, sd2, ... If you don't recall the number, don't worry, you can press Enter. The upgrade script will try to mount an "a" partition and look for an etc/fstab file. If it isn't successful, it will prompt again.

The upgrade script will ask you which disk to upgrade. You'll select the appropriate drive, such as sd0, sd1, sd2, ... If you don't recall the number, don't worry, you can press Enter. The upgrade script will try to mount an "a" partition and look for an etc/fstab file. If it isn't successful, it will prompt again.

But i think that's the case when your disk isn't encrypted, isn't it?

There's a bioctl command I need to run in the shell prior to enter the Upgrade script for it to can mount and access the encrypted drive.

When you boot a bootloader from an encrypted disk, the bootloader decrypts the softraid drive in order to locate, and load the kernel before passing control to it. The decryption key is passed to the kernel, so that it can address the drive via softraid(4).

The only plaintext sectors on an FDE drive are MBR/GPT, disklabel, softraid metadata, and the bootloader. The kernel uses the softraid(4) driver to conduct I/O.

The RAMDISK kernel (bsd.rd) includes the softraid(4) driver.

Step 1: place the new bsd.rd kernel in the root directory. It's an encrypted directory, because the entire drive (except as above) is encrypted.
Step 2: reboot the system
Step 3: provide your passphrase or your keydisk to the bootloader.
Step 4: tell the bootloader to load the new bsd.rd kernel. The kernel will assign an sd drive number to the decrypted disk.
Step 5. Run the upgrade script.
Step 6. Give the script the sd drive number to upgrade.

Being this my firsts steps in OpenBSD, I wonder, is that information available somewhere? or did you know by your experience? I can't seem to found anything in my searches on the matter, only how to install to an encrypted disk, but i already did that when i installed 6.1 weeks ago.

It is documented in softraid(4) and boot(8/{amd64,i386,sparc64}), but not in a howto/faq form. The OpenBSD Journal published an article that included an upgrade discussion in 2011, but while these articles are accurate at the time of publication, they are not updated/revised for later changes in technology.